University of Ottawa professor Luisa Veronis is researching refugee integration. Jolson Lim, Centretown NewsThe federal ministries of Science and Immigration recently announced an investment of $600,000 in grants to fund 25 research projects studying issues that affect the successful resettlement of refugees in Canada.
Luisa Veronis, Chair of Graduate Studies and Associate Professor in the Department of Geography, Environment and Geomatics at the University of Ottawa, is part of a research team that received $24,994 worth of funding through this program, which was announced Sept. 8.
The project, which Veronis is working on with two other researchers from Wilfrid Laurier University and Hamilton Economic Development, will study Local Immigrant Partnerships (LIPs) and their role in the Syrian refugee resettlement process.
They have chosen to focus their study on LIPs in three Ontario cities — Ottawa, Waterloo and Hamilton — which became hubs for refugees last year when Canada began the process of welcoming 30,000 refugees from November 2015 to August 2016.
“This project will be an evaluation of the role of the LIPs since they were created,” said Veronis. “We have a very unique opportunity here, given the sense of urgency with the number of refugees arriving.
For Ottawa, it will be an evaluation of how well the Ottawa LIPs and local stakeholders performed, and maybe it will identify some things that worked a little better than others.”
Before establishment of LIPs, the actors involved in the refugee resettlement process were working in an uncoordinated way. The LIPs were created in 2005 with the signing of the Canada-Ontario Immigration Agreement to help connect these stakeholders.
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and Veronis’ project aims to measure the difference that the LIPS have made in the resettlement process.
“The project is comparative, which is an important factor,” Veronis explains. “We have selected three cities, which have been identified as resettlement centres for Syrian refugees. Each of those cities has a very different context… the local culture surrounding immigrant resettlement is different. So this is a great opportunity to compare the different contexts in which the LIPs have operated.”
She hopes that the research project will be able to develop a best-practices list for these situations, which will ultimately make the immigration and resettlement process as smooth as possible for newcomers to Canada. This research also has the potential to highlight successful practices being used by local settlement organizations that could be useful if implemented elsewhere, she says.
Lynsey James is the director of primary care at the Centretown Community Health Centre and has been closely involved in helping refugees settle in Ottawa.
Since December, the centre has offered short-term care and housing to 151 Syrian refugees, and then took on 58 of those people as ongoing primary healthcare clients. James says that she saw a lack of access to housing, translation and transportation as the biggest issues for refugee families resettling in Ottawa.
“There was an insufficient supply of housing,” she says. “That was a challenge because there were large families, so you have to be able to provide them with the right type of housing or else they would be stuck in hotels. Some families were stuck in hotels for longer than what is typical, due to the high volume of people who arrived.”
She said that settlement staff were also stretched too thin to be able to visit all of the families at home. Home visits are a crucial step in the resettlement process as they are used to orient families with regards to the location of basic amenities such as grocery stores, schools, hospitals and public transit, said James.
James added that she hopes the research project will be able to offer solutions about how to provide for refugees in areas where resources are now lacking. “Hopefully,” she said, “it highlights how there could be better communication between different levels of government to allow for more advanced planning or a more seamless response.”